Salem Witch Trials: Physiological, Psychological, and Sociological Theories

Introduction: The Salem Witch Trials in Historical Context

The Salem witch trials stand as one of the most notorious atrocities in early American history. Several young girls, who had heard tales of the supernatural from a West Indian slave, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused three women of witchcraft. Put in that position, the three women, in turn, named others in false confessions (Merriam-Webster 1416).

This caused hysteria much like Joseph McCarthy caused in 1950 in his hunt for Communists. Unlike the McCarthy era, however, the penalty for "witches" was death. Anyone who behaved in a way that people could not understand was subjected to scrutiny.

There are many theories about the behavior of the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts, between May and October of 1692 — the behavior that caused nineteen "witches" to be executed and one hundred fifty others to be imprisoned (Merriam-Webster 1416). What caused the people of that town to turn against their own? Did the Salem witch trials occur because of a sociological, psychological, and/or physiological problem?

This paper will explain the physiological theories, the psychological theories, and the sociological theories based on various sources, and let the reader make up his or her own mind regarding what was really happening during the Salem witch trials. The reader can decide whether it was physiological, psychological, or sociological — or perhaps a little of all three.

Physiological Theories: Encephalitis and Biological Explanations

The physiological theories regarding the Salem witch trials hold that the citizens of Salem were afflicted with a virus or fungus. Laurie Winn Carlson's theory is that the citizens of Salem were physiologically afflicted with a virus called encephalitis lethargica. Did this virus cause some citizens of Salem to become victims — not of the virus itself, but of execution, imprisonment, and abuse? This is the question that will be explored.

Carlson, in A Fever in Salem, writes that the people of Salem behaved very strangely:

"During this period something unexplainable and distinct from known illness caused people and domestic animals to behave strangely. This unseen force caused people to fall into fits, feel pains in their arms and legs like biting and pricking, bark like dogs, grovel on the ground like hogs, and even turn suicidal. Psychotic hallucinations were frightening." (Carlson 6)

She attributes these symptoms to the encephalitis virus, usually transmitted by mosquitoes.

Dr. Marjorie Lazoff describes the symptoms of encephalitis. Encephalitis, otherwise known as the sleeping disease, causes fevers, headaches, a stiff neck, and photophobia. A person can experience body aches similar to those of influenza, become lethargic, and sometimes slip into a coma. Characteristic neurological signs can include delirium, uncoordinated involuntary movements, and localized weakness. The most severe cases of encephalitis can cause a person to contort and convulse, although convulsions are most common in infants (Merriam-Webster 530). There is no predilection for gender, except that SSPE (Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis) is two to four times more prevalent in male children (Lazoff 5).

The symptoms that the afflicted displayed were convulsive fits that were grotesque and violent. The fits were so strange because the seizures would cause body parts to move and be positioned in ways that were unnatural — ways that a healthy person would not be able to duplicate (Hansen 21). Other symptoms of the afflicted included "temporary loss of hearing, speech, and sight; loss of memory, a choking sensation in their throat, and loss of appetite" (Hansen 21). Hallucinations and body aches were part of the mix as well. Sometimes the afflicted would speak in a voice not their own or bark like dogs.

Perhaps it can be said that because doctors did not know about encephalitis and its symptoms, they blamed it on Satan and possession in order to cover their own ignorance — much as a present-day doctor might attribute unknown symptoms to psychosomatic causes.

However, while the symptoms that the afflicted exhibited and the symptoms of encephalitis do seem to coincide, there are some symptoms that remain unexplained. The temporary loss of hearing, speech, and sight do not appear to be part of the encephalitis symptom inventory. Moreover, convulsions associated with encephalitis are most common in infants, not adults — yet a great many adults in 1692 had convulsions so severe that their tongues protruded and their limbs locked so rigidly that the limbs had to be broken in order to move them. Perhaps there was a particularly severe strain of the encephalitis virus at work, since many strains of the virus exist, according to Dr. Marjorie Lazoff.

Psychological Theories: Pretense, Hysteria, and Mental Illness

Another theory regarding the Salem witch trials is that the symptoms people displayed were psychological in origin. There are four parts to this psychological perspective: pretense, mob hysteria, hysteria arising from anxiousness and fear, and mental illness such as schizophrenia and senility.

Pretense

The pretense theory holds that people were feigning afflictions either because they feared being accused of witchcraft themselves or because they wanted the opportunity to accuse others for revenge or personal gain. In fact, that is how it all started. When Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Martha Goodwin, and others began to exhibit strange symptoms, the accusations followed.

In 1692, there was little for a young girl to do beyond work and attend church. Their behavior was strictly constrained by religious expectation:

"Young women in that time and place had nothing to feed the imagination to expand understanding or heighten sensitivity. There were no fairytales or stories to help order and make sense of experience. There was no art or theater or any but the simplest music to express and give form to chaotic emotion. Boys enjoyed hunting, trapping, and fishing, carpentry, and crafts. For girls there were no such outlets for animal high spirits or mental creativity." (Hill 7)

The theory is that the girls were so repressed, and so desperate for freedom, that they pretended to bark like dogs and speak incoherently. They acted as though they had no control over themselves. They knew they would not be punished if their afflictions were believed to have serious supernatural causes. Other girls, seeing that Betty and Abigail were able to act out without repercussions, began to pretend they had the same symptoms.

When a doctor could not explain what was happening to them, the girls began naming their tormentors aloud. The idea of blaming witchcraft came from tales told by the family's West Indian slave couple. Witchcraft was the perfect solution — it allowed the girls to continue their behavior without consequence, since no one could prove or disprove it as the cause of their afflictions. Panic grew among the adults, who found it easier to blame something tangible and eradicate it than to face an unexplained threat to their children.

When the accused were brought to the gallows, the girls reportedly laughed and gloated at the executions. Documents record outright fabrications that were unrelated to any physical or mental condition:

"The testimony of Daniel Eliot, aged twenty-seven years or thereabouts, who testifieth and saith, that I being at the house of Lieutenant Ingersoll on the 28th of March in the year 1692, there being present one of the afflicted persons, which cried out and said, 'There's Goody Procter.' William Raymond being there present told the girl he believed she lied, for he saw nothing. Goody Ingersoll told the girl she told a lie. Then the girl said that she did it for sport — they must have some sport." (Hansen 154)

Mob Hysteria

A second psychological theory is mob hysteria. A small number of girls may initially have been pretending — motivated by the factors described above, or by family conflicts with specific individuals — but the fear of being accused soon spread. Others began simulating afflictions for different reasons. As the panic intensified and more people were executed or jailed, community members pretended to be afflicted in order to demonstrate publicly that they were the bewitched, not the bewitcher.

Mob hysteria also caused the citizens of Salem to scrutinize one another intensely, making accusations over the smallest perceived irregularities in behavior. This fueled an ever-widening cycle of arrests and executions.

Hysteria Due to Anxiousness or Fear

The third psychological theory involves hysteria rooted in anxiety and fear:

"Hysteria is a term formerly used in psychology to designate a neurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of psychic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions. It was eventually dropped from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as overly broad. Disorders with symptoms similar to those of traditional hysteria include conversion disorder, factitious disorder, dissociative disorder, and personality disorder (histrionic type)." (Merriam-Webster 786)

J.-M. Charcot and Sigmund Freud, renowned psychologists, conducted classic studies on the disorder known as hysteria. Charcot, in Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System (1877), concurs that the symptoms evident in 1692 were consistent with hysteria disorder.

For example, if a person believed that someone was sticking pins into a doll made in their likeness in order to cause them harm, the person might become sufficiently anxious or fearful to actually fall ill. The illness would not be caused by the pins, but by the person's own fear and anxiety. If the people of Salem believed their neighbors were bewitching them into states of delirium and convulsion, perhaps they became so anxious and fearful that they did indeed begin to experience these symptoms.

One of the Salem girls, Elizabeth Knapp, displayed symptoms strikingly similar to those in one of Charcot's nineteenth-century cases. Charcot described his patient's episode as follows:

"Her fits are characterized in the first stage by epileptiform and tetaniform convulsions; after this come great gesticulations of a voluntary character, in which the patient, assuming the most frightful postures, reminds one of the attitudes which history assigns to the demoniacs.... At this stage of the attack, she is a prey to delirium, and raves evidently of the events which seem to have determined her first seizures. She hurls furious invectives against imaginary individuals, crying out, 'Villains! Robbers! Brigands!! Fire! Fire! O, the dogs! I'm bitten!' — Reminiscences, doubtless, of the emotions experienced in her youth." (Hansen 40)

After the fits came hallucinations, and after both subsided, the patient felt better than before — in a state of comfort and relaxation. Elizabeth Knapp mirrored these afflictions closely.

Mental Illness

The fourth psychological theory is that some individuals were executed or imprisoned not because of feigned afflictions, but because they genuinely suffered from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or senility. One notable case was that of Mary Glover:

"The woman was named Mary Glover but is referred to by Cotton as 'the hag.' An Irish Catholic, she damned herself in court by uttering what the magistrates considered a confession, though her meaning might not have been clear since she spoke in Irish through interpreters. And, besides, she talked in so wandering and incoherent a fashion that the court appointed six physicians to examine whether she was 'craz'd in her intellectuals.' Sadly for her, they decided she was not, though it is apparent to the reader, from Cotton's account of her ravings about hearing the voices of spirits or saints and of her rage when questioned more closely, that she was schizophrenic or senile." (Hill 18)

Mary Glover was sentenced to death. If a mentally ill person in Salem happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were jailed or executed for something entirely beyond their control.

Conclusion: Multiple Theories, One Tragic Event

This paper has covered a broad range of theories but deliberately left open one final possibility: that there really was witchcraft occurring in that small town called Salem. In any event, from Carlson's theory of a biological virus to Charcot's clinical theory of hysteria, the explanations are all available for examination. It is entirely possible that the Salem witch trials resulted from a combination of all the theories discussed here — or from some cause not yet fully conceived.

What is certain is that nineteen people were executed, one hundred fifty were imprisoned, and an entire community was torn apart. Whether the cause was physiological, psychological, sociological, or some intersection of all three, the human cost of Salem's tragedy remains a compelling subject for historical and interdisciplinary inquiry.

Works Cited

Carlson, Laurie Winn. A Fever in Salem. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999.

Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1969.

Hill, Frances. A Delusion of Satan. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Lazoff, Marjorie, MD. "Encephalitis." Emedicine. 9 Sep. 2002. 17 pag. Online. Internet. 27 Oct. 2002.

Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

"Encephalitis," "Hysteria," and "Salem witch trials." Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia (2000).